Weekly Update #202: GENBA no Kizuna’s Suspects

And so, we have (unfortunately) reached the end of Jurassic June. As mentioned at the very beginning, we wanted this month to focus on the suspect characters appearing in our next murder mystery visual novel GENBA no Kizuna. One of them became the subject of this month’s special artwork and the other three were introduced through a little poster in last week’s blog post.

But now I guess it’s finally time to shed some more light on these Warriors of the Mesozoic!

If you have played the demo for GENBA, or just followed our updates for a while, you may already know that the story takes place at the Kaseki Residence, which was once owned by the world-renowned paleontologist Prof. Dr. Genshi Kaseki. After his passing, his grandson Ryuunosuke Hazama inherited it and now, lives there together with his three close friends Shiku Jura, Amber Harding and Terano Umou.

Together, the three of them comprise a tiny group of indie filmmakers, calling themselves Raptor Pack Productions. Currently, they work on the completion of their first movie, Warriors Of The Mesozoic, which is created in collaboration with local movie director and theater owner Akira Ginmaku. We will talk about Akira some other time, because today, I want to solely focus on the Raptor Pack.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the individual members!

Ryuu (as he is usually referred to by his friends) is the leader of the Raptor Pack, despite being the youngest among them. He is a very ambitious individual. Once he has set his mind to something, he will not rest until his goal has been achieved. He is the creator, and screenwriter of Warriors Of The Mesozoic and plays the part of the villainous Dr. Wu in the movie. To others, outside of his circle of close friends, he can be difficult to work with, and his uncooperative behavior is sure to cause Keiichi and the other investigators quite the headache.

Shiku is Ryuunosuke‘s childhood friend. As the daughter of the neighbors, she ended up spending most of her childhood at the Kaseki Residence with Ryuunosuke, learning about dinosaurs from his grandfather. Being a year older, she also used to act like a sort of older sister towards him. Now, she works with him to accomplish his goal of making a dinosaur movie. Not actually playing a role in the movie, she is responsible for camerawork, costumes and makeup. She is a very introverted person that can only show her true self when she’s with her close friends.

Amber, often called Amby or Kohaku by the others, is a very calm and relaxed young woman. She studied Japanese and paleobotany at a university in the United States before travelling all the way to Japan in order to study under Prof. Dr. Kaseki. Through this, she also met Ryuunosuke and Shiku, and ended up forging a strong bond with them during her stays at the residence. After the professor’s passing, she decided to remain with them and help make their vision of creating a movie a reality. She actually plays the lead role in Warriors Of The Mesozoic: the Warrior Princess Mayana.

Terano, or simply T as the others refer to him, is a very extroverted person with a passion for birds. Falconry is actually one of his hobbies and he keeps a pet vulture around, which he has named Alexis (although he mostly calls her Lex or Lexy instead). He is a long-time internet friend of Ryuunosuke and decided to lend his aid once the decision was made to create a movie. He is also very skilled at digital image/video manipulation and therefore takes care of the movie’s visual effects. He does have a role in it too, however: Korut, strongest warrior of the Galyan Tribe!

So yeah, that’s it. Those are the four suspects in GENBA‘s murder case.

One thing I didn’t mention for each of them individually, because they all share it equally, is a strong passion for dinosaurs. But if you’ve been following us for a while, I guess you knew about that already. The four of them are the biggest dino nerds you can imagine, and their passion for these prehistoric creatures is going to shine through in many different ways.

I don’t want to say too much else about them for now, but I did want to at least provide a little bit of information. You can, however, check out their design sketches and learn a bit more about the ideas behind their designs, as well as the meanings behind their names, by clicking on their names above. They will take you to the characters’ Patreon postings, which are now publicly available. And this brings me to another topic I wanted to talk about today.

These design sketches have been up on Patreon for over half a year now, and even though it is still a bit embarrassing to share them publicly, I thought I should do so. You might have noticed, but so far, there hasn’t been a single public Patreon post and I wanted to change. I think it might make it a bit easier for people interested in supporting us to decide whether or not they want to go through with it. Because now, they can at least get an idea of the kind of content we provide over there.

I will talk a bit more about Patreon content next week, but yeah… for now, I hope you will enjoy these postings. And if you do, please consider supporting us! It would be greatly appreciated and help us out quite a lot with the development of our new projects!

Speaking of Patreon content, there’s a couple of new patron-only postings available as well. I have uploaded another new BGM for GENBA. This time, it’s Himatsu‘s character theme. There is also an unused track for SHINRAI, though. An alternate version of Rihatsu’s 8bit ringtone, to be precise. Finally, the poll for this year’s anniversary artwork is now live! So you can now help decide which characters will be featured in it!

I think that’s about it. Jurassic June might have come to a close, but please look forward to more information about GENBA (and Withering Without Hope) in the near future! Until then, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, as always, take care! :3